With new social media forums emerging everyday and the participation on these forums increasing, it has become useful to identify if two authors writing on two different social media forums correspond to the same person or not. This process is referred to herein as disambiguating authors. This presents an important challenge in analyzing social media communications. By way of example, if a product company is attempting to assess how many people like or dislike their product/services, provide customer care, or promote their products based on social media communications, the company will likely wish to ascertain if the same person is writing or posting relevant comments on multiple social media outlets. Further, the company may even wish to identify a customer record in their databases corresponding to this individual.
Accordingly, as the number of people participating in social media forums and the number of such forums increase, there is a need of disambiguating (or matching) participants across social media forums. Disambiguation authors presents a challenge, additionally, given that most forums do not allow accessing details such as e-mail addresses or telephone numbers of participants to external entities.